Known are motor vehicles with convertible bodies of different design with a chamber in the rear part of the body to hold a hard folding roof (Russian Federation patent No. 2015036 published in 1994; U.S. Pat. No. 4,634,171 published in 1987; U.S. Pat. No. 5,090,764 published in 1992; U.S. Pat. No. 5,649,733 published in 1997; USA application No. 2004061352 published in 2004).
In motor vehicles of the known designs the chamber in the rear part of the body with the folded hard roof is reduced to a volume occupied by the roof sections. To decrease the volume occupied by the hard top of the body, it is multi-link manufactured with a lot of interacting links. A great number of structural components complicates and raises the price of the motor vehicle design and requires high accuracy at the manufacture and assembly of separate components.
Known is a motor vehicle (U.S. Pat. No. 6,347,828 published in 2002), containing a body with a two-piece roof placed vertically in a chamber located behind the seats. This design allows the boot to be free from the folded hard top. The drawback to this design is a complex mechanism of the roof conversion and considerable volume occupied by the folded roof.
Known is a motor vehicle (U.S. Pat. No. 6,595,572 published in 2003), which body has a hard folding top, consisting of two pivotally connected front and rear roof sections capable of rotating with respect to each other and to the motor vehicle body. In the initial position with the roofed body the front section of the roof is adjacent to the windscreen frame, while the rear section is hingedly fixed on the motor vehicle body in its rear part. In the end position with the opened roof the sections rotate relative to each other and motor vehicle body and are placed in its rear part and closed with a movable cover.
The drawback to this design is a considerably lost useful volume occupied with the folded roof sections, and also the roof folding mechanism's complexity.
The above considered hard folding roof designs are limited to use in motor vehicles with engines located in the front part of the body (front-mounted engines) only and can not be used in motor vehicles with mid- and rear-mounted engines for reasons of insufficient space to hold the folded roof in case of the rear-mounted engines. Besides, the existing hard folding roof designs are used with ‘sedan’ type bodies only that have a separate boot volume and can not be used in widely accepted ‘hatchback’ type bodies.